You Rest, You Rust

‘You Rest, You Rust’ reframes the Norwegian cabin fireplace as a site for exploring ritual, decay, and cultural identity. An enlarged model of the fireplace from the designer’s family cabin is fitted with a MIDI controller that, in response to touch, triggers and distorts the sound of crackling wood. It is clad in veneers made from sandpaper, laminated after high-speed erosion.

Developed through research with craftspeople, museum conservators, and cultural institutions in Norway, the project engages with national identity, memory, and vernacular design. It critiques idealisation and commodification of folk traditions, exploring how repetition — across carving, sanding and sound — can induce trance-like states linked to embodied knowledge.

By treating tradition as performative rather than fixed, ‘You Rest, You Rust’ turns the fireplace into a threshold: between craft and code, preservation and erosion, myth and material, reflecting on how inherited forms might be held, distorted and remade.